Enterprise transformation (and you can too)

What you'll learn

Learn how Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) went from a three-year waterfall delivery cycle to three-week iterations

Description

“That would never work here.” You’ve likely heard this sentiment echo from your company’s conference rooms or board rooms (or maybe you’ve said it yourself). There are always reasons: established processes (with vested interests supporting them), legacy codebases and data centers (both with large install footprints), and scale (for some values of scale), to name just a few.

Good news: change is possible. Donovan Brown walks you through a case study from Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). VSTS went from a three-year waterfall delivery cycle to three-week iterations and open sourced the VSTS task library and the Git Virtual File System (GVFS). To make these changes, the team had to question its tool choices, change its processes, and empower its people. You’ll learn why integration of cross-functional teams is key to the continuous delivery of value to end users.

Donovan Brown

Microsoft

Donovan Brown aka The Man in the Black Shirt is a principal DevOps manager on Microsoft’s cloud developer advocacy team. Developer tools are his thing. Donovan has traveled the globe helping companies in the US, Canada, India, Germany, and the UK develop solutions using Agile practices, Visual Studio, and Team Foundation Server in industries such as communications, healthcare, energy, and financial services. Previously, Donovan spent seven years as a process consultant and a certified Scrum Master. Donovan’s an avid programmer, often finding ways to integrate software into his other hobbies and activities, one of which is professional air hockey, where he has ranked as high as 11th in the world.